“Let’s go, Brandon”

Was it a misinterpretation? A well-meaning reporter’s deft attempt to avoid a Federal Communications Commission fine for airing “obvious profanity”? An example of the perfidious mainstream media’s pro-Democrat bias?

Or was it something else entirely?

Here’s what we know: On October 2, as 28-year-old racecar driver Brandon Brown was being interviewed about his winning race at Talladega Superspeedway in Alabama, some people in the stands were chanting “Fuck Joe Biden!” (What provoked the political chant at a nonpolitical gathering? Unclear, but it had already been well documented, along with the #FJB hashtag, both on- and offline.)

NBC Sports reporter Kelli Stavast either heard or wanted to hear something different:

WTF are the “fboys” in “FBOY Island”?

Although it’s given all-caps styling in the title, FBOY Island, HBOMax’s first foray into reality TV, is not an initialism. Rather, it’s an abbreviation of, and a euphemism for, fuckboy. It’s an oddly diffident elision when you consider that HBO has been gleefully detonating F-bombs for a couple of decades.

I’ll get to the story behind the coyness—and to the history of fuckboy—in a bit. First, though, an introduction to the series, whose first three episodes premiered on July 29 and which will continue through August 12.

Yep, it’s another “dating” show—the title nods to Love Island, Paradise Island, and, for all of us 30 Rock fans, the wholly fictional and hilarious MILF Island—with a familiar setup. Three young women who have slightly different skin tones but are otherwise hard to tell apart (size 00, hair extensions, false eyelashes) are transported to a magnificent villa on a tropical island (not identified, but it’s Grand Cayman, and the villa costs $5,198 a night). So are 24 young men who appear to have spent vast amounts of time at the gym and the barber shop, and whose occupations include “bitcoin investor,” “CBD entrepreneur,” “TikToker,” “club promoter,” “talent agent,” “child care-slash-influencer,” and “exotic dancer-slash-realtor.”

Shit! Goddamn! Sing sweary songs and jam

It’s a couple of years since our last fuck shit stack of sweary songs, and almost five since we began this series at the Rotten Cocksuckers’ Ball. So it’s about fucking time we posted some more bawdy blues and mothercussin’ melodies.

Much of the audio below is NSFW, if that still means anything, but it straddles the range from super-profane to merely suggestive. Genre-wise it’s cheerfully all over the place, so if you don’t like one, try the next.

LaVern Baker and Jackie Wilson clearly enjoyed this party version of ‘Think Twice’:

I said you better think twice, Jackie
Before you call me a dirty ho
I’ve got news for you, little boy
Don’t fuck with me no mo’

Testicular fortitude

If you ever played the video game Duke Nukem, you might remember his signature catchphrase, “I’ve got balls of steel.” This use of balls features widely in the English lexicon, as in:

• ballsy
• big balls
• break my balls
• have (someone) by the balls
• ball-buster

So it’s understandable that when you encounter a phrase or idiom with “balls” in it, the cojones are a go-to cognate. But that can lead one astray. Take, for example, “balls to the wall,” meaning to be racing flat-out. This comes to us from aviation, where the throttles are topped with knobs and are pushed fully forward for maximum power.

WTF?! We need a game-night game about profanity!

If you go to Louisville, Kentucky — as my wife and I do as frequently as we can — you have to eat, so you’re always on the lookout for worthwhile restaurants. Frankly, we tend to eat at our favorite spots whenever we visit, but before our last weekend there, I checked the restaurant-tagged Google map for new places. There was one of our favorites, Doc Crow’s — oysters on the shell, exceptional pork rinds — and just behind it was a bar called The Troll Pub. I clicked over to its website and immediately exclaimed “What the fuck?” which was only partly an expression of my incredulity, because at The Troll Pub they have WTF happy hours — Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays — so I was also just reading what was in front of me. But what an offense! I stared in disbelief at WTF, a perfectly good profanity, brought down by a marketing pun. “How often are we taken in by this indirection?” I wondered. In fact, it happens more than you’d think, let alone hope. I learned this when shopping around for fun game night games, some of which perpetrate similar puns.